Interview with Rick Rozoff, the manager of the Stop NATO website and mailing list and a contributing writer to www.globalresearch.ca

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has written is a white paper regarding Russian security and the upgrading of Russian military forces in response to NATO’s expansion. Can you give us some insights into this?

I’m probably not that familiar with all the particulars as you are, but I think I understand the gist of it, which is that in the face of increased military hardware of the United States and its NATO allies being brought closer to Russia’s border, and we’re talking particularly about the so-called missile shield that is placing interceptor missiles capable of knocking out other nations’ missiles and radars to accompany those missile deployments, Russia will need to be able to protect its strategic military potential against efforts to neutralize it.

Earlier this month Prime Minister Putin made a comment, and a pretty straight-forward one, that neither Iran nor North Korea poses any missile problem so that the development of what he which quite accurately, by the way, described as a global missile shield with a European component. And that reflects what Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had said earlier this year – he used the same expression, because in fact that’s what it is – it’s an effort to be able to have sea- and land-based interceptor missiles placed strategically so as to achieve global dominance. Putin also alluded without naming it as such, to what we understand to be Prompt Global Strike or the Conventional Prompt Global Strike concept.

When he said that certain countries, and he meant the United States in the first instance without having to naming it, are developing the capability to deliver high-precision, long-range missiles with conventional loads – and that’s Prompt Global Strike. To achieve, as the prime minister put it, the same effect as strategic as strategic weapons would, in other words to have the same ability to upset the international balance of military forces in the world but also to be able to ultimately destroy the military potential of other countries short of using nuclear weapons. That’s Prompt Global Strike.

What do you think about the current situation? Last time we talked about Ambassador McFaul and this before there was supposed to be this big opposition rallies. They’ve come and gone, they were a big disappointment, I’m sure, for Mr. McFaul. What do you think about this “orange” threat, is it really a threat?

It looks like it’s been diffused. I mean there are certainly efforts afoot by the usual cast of characters – rogues gallery – of U.S agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development, USIA and others.

Do you think the Russian Federation has the technology to be able to neutralize the attempted neutralization of its own forces?

Counterneutralization, if you will. I sincerely hope it does. Recently it has been confirmed that the U.S. is deploying four Aegis-class guided missile destroyers – permanently – to the Rota naval base in Spain to be used in the Mediterranean, and that’s adding to the recently deployed missile shield radar in Turkey and so forth. This is also coming on the heels of the United States confirming after the meeting of the U.S. and Georgian presidents – Barack Obama and Mikhail Saakashvilli – that the U.S. is going to help rebuild the so-called defensive military capabilities of Georgia.

Another comment by Vladimir Putin that has been reported today is he is talking about the fact that certain countries, and again we know who he is speaking about – the United States and its NATO allies – are fomenting and stoking conflicts near and on the borders of Russia and its allies. That’s a rough paraphrase, but your listeners will get the idea. Earlier we talked about the efforts by certain officials in the United States and I’m sure the U.S. embassy in Moscow to foment so-called color revolution-type political activities in Russia and having failed that…These are people who intend, I’m talking about the West of course, who intend to win and intend to have their will forced on the world by fair means or foul. And if they fail in one respect they resort to another.

We have to keep in mind by the way with the presidential election coming up, what the political elite in the United States and in other NATO capitals holds against Vladimir Putin, aside from all domestic and foreign policy issues, there is one overriding grudge they bear against him and that’s a nine-minute speech he made at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2007. For people familiar with the Aesopian fable about the cat and the mice, what he did was he belled the cat. He identified to the world – and the world heard him – that in the past twenty years there’s been the emergence of, and I use his own wording, a unipolar world. I believe his exact terms at the time were that there is now one center of power, one center of force, one center of decision-making, and the world bridles under that sort of unilateral domination.

And it’s for that speech, I believe more than anything else, it’s for that that he will never be forgiven and it’s for that the United States would not like to see him become the president of the Russian Federation again. Of course again they are not going to be able to prevent it, but what the U.S. is doing relentlessly of course is increasing its strategic and missile shield capabilities dangerously close to Russia’s borders, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea to the Caucasus.

McFaul, he was the supposed the architect of this “reset”, now people are saying that if Vladimir Putin becomes the president of the Russian Federation again the “reset” will be over. What do you think about that?

I think the “reset” was over…I think it was still-born. I don’t believe that it was anything other than a public relations gambit by the United States. The fact is that the U.S. and NATO still refuse to give Russia any guarantees whatsoever that the so-called European Phased Adaptive Approach missile shield system, which is becoming more ambitious with each succeeding phase, is not targeted against Russia. In fact what Vladimir Putin said recently was, that as Iran and as North Korea are not the threats they’re being portrayed as being, then the missile shield is indeed aimed at Russia and at the strategic potential in the west of the country.

In one year what do you see the relations between Russia and NATO?

If NATO continues to aggressively assert itself as a self-proclaimed international security provider, to use the euphemism it’s fond of using, which is to say a military alliance willing and able to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations with military means at its discretion, then Russia is going to have to draw a line and the world is going to have to draw a line.

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